Webb Family Blog

Kellie and I received a call on Friday that Terri (my youngest sister) had been admitted to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, NV for pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH). There is one definitive treatment for this condition and that is to deliver a baby. Terri’s baby was nearly 37 weeks gestation. Terri was placed on medications Friday evening to prevent eclampsia, a complication of PIH. It seemed as if Terri was not progressing as the medical staff was attempting to induce labor, but apparently, when she was ready, things happened fast. Terri’s oldest sister Debbie, along with Patrick’s father and best-friend’s wife Christina, were moments late to witness the birth. Rachel Nicole Taaffe was born at 7:13 AM (PST). Rachel was 5 pounds and 9 ounces in weight and 17 inches in length. Terri had a problem that required a surgical procedure shortly after the birth and necessitated a longer stay in the hospital than originally planned.

Kellie and I had school-work that needed to be accomplished by Sunday, but left for Reno on Saturday evening. We traveled straight to the hospital and met Rachel for the first time. She was sleeping. Terri was alone with Rachel when we first arrived, but Patrick, Debbie, Christina and Patrick’s father arrived shortly thereafter. It was getting late, so we all left around 9:30 PM to let Terri get some well-deserved sleep.
Kellie and I slept in a bit Sunday morning, but after some breakfast, we went to the hospital and visited more with Terri. Much of the day, Rachel was sleeping but waking occasionally to bond with her mom and family. I spent much of the day finalizing the school group project that was due that day, in the corner of the room. Several friends from Terri’s school and church also came to visit, as well as Patrick, his father, Christina and Debbie again. Many pictures were taken. Kellie also learned that her camera has the capability to record small videos.

Kellie and I left around 9:30 PM again Sunday evening. On Monday morning, Terri and Rachel were supposed to be discharged. When I called around 8 AM, Terri mentioned she had already seen her physician and needed to do “one more thing.” This turned into several “things” before they finally left the hospital, a little after noon. Meanwhile, Kellie and I did some shopping for food and personal items for Terri and went to Terri and Patrick’s place to await the arrival of mom and baby. The entourage arrived around 1:30 PM. Kellie and I met the new parents and Debbie with a spaghetti lunch. We continued visiting until 5:30PM, when Kellie and I needed to leave to come back home to Roseville.

I've just made a SLIGHT modification to the blog. I thought I'd tell people about it, in case they wish to take advantage of it. As you may have seen with many of my posts, I make many links to outside websites. If you click on these, it may take you away from the blog, then you'd have to reload the blog. That is kind of a pain. I use Firefox as my browser, as I suggest anyone to do.  I like to open new windows into new tabs, as Firefox is a tab-based browser.  Instead of having one web-page per window, tabs allow you to have multiple web pages open in one window.  You normally only look at one at a time, but they are placed into tabs… like an index tab.  You click on the one you want and that page is displayed.  Anyway, I normally have to "Right-click" on the links and tell it to open page in new tab.  This is kind of a pain to have to do… it just doesn't feel natural.  I found a bit of JavaScript code that allows people to choose whether they want the links to normally open in a new window/tab or wether you want to replace the current page with the link. 

In order to do this in Firefox, I'd suggest you also add the "Tabbrowser Preferences" extension.  Once installed, go into Firefox's preferences and you'll find the "Tabbed Browsing" setting. Make sure that it under  "Load Web browser links into a:" is set for a new tab.

EVEN if you don't want to follow all that advice, you may still like to check mark the option.  It is on the left sidebar of the blog website under "Link Options"… between "Recent Comments" and "Search".

I've just upgraded the software of this website.  I'm hoping that for the most part, you don't notice anything.  I believe I set everything back the way it was before the upgrade, but I'm not 100% positive that I have.  You may wonder then WHAT was upgraded then.  Well… to be honest, I'm not exactly sure myself.  I upgraded from WordPress 2.0.1 to 2.0.4.  I had try'd many times to upgrade earlier when it was an upgrade to 2.0.3, but kept on failing.  I tried following the "simple" instructions.  It finally dawned on me that I needed to do several extra steps to upgrade.  I took those extra steps and it appears I've been successful.  Apparently, there were some security flaws and a few bugs that have been worked out since the inital version I had installed.  I never figured those old flaws out.

I’ve been at it again. This time, I’ve added a simple photo gallery to the blog. It isn’t as perfect as I’d like, but it was fairly simple. I used a plugin called "Duh Gallery". I have had to make a few modifications to it and there is apparently a size limit to the pictures. Apparently the person that wrote this made it for a language other than English, as the "Previous" and "Next" buttons were in a foreign language. I also had to work out a few other small bugs. I now have it working at least. In case you are curious as to the names of the galleries, they are taken from the directory the pictures are located in; Linux does not allow for spaces and punctuation in the names of directories. So far, I’ve added 2 galleries… pictures taken by my mother-in-law Donna Weifert at a family gathering at Sizzler in Roseville, and pictures taken by my father Fred Webb at our Mother’s Day gathering at our house. Eventually, I’ll have some of our wedding pictures up here as well as other galleries.

As anyone regularly reading my blog can tell, I have been making many small changes to the blog for a few weeks.  I’ve been trying to learn many new things in regards to editing PHP scripts and CSS stylesheets.  I have also been trying to think of a way to get more involvement with family… as that is one of my goals by hosting a blog.  I then came up with an idea to branch off a bit into a family forum.  I’ve been using forums for years, but never really understood the under-workings of them.  The more I’ve been messing around with PHP, CSS, MySQL databases and stuff, I figured I’d try looking into forum software.  Seeing as though I’m doing this for fun and not for a job, I’m not looking to actually PAY anything for it… just learn how to do it via Open Source software.  I found an Open Source program called phpBB.

After downloading the software, I thought about HOW I wanted to implement the forum.  One thing I was hoping to do was to improve the way our family communicates as a group.  Currently, when we want to plan an event, we use email to put in our "two cents."  The To: line gets pretty long and sometimes, someone unintentionally gets left out.  With the forum, you write your message and it goes up.  Those that set up their account to get notifications of new messages will get an email that something new is posted.  I probably won’t need that, as I’ll probably be checking it as frequently as I check my email, which is pretty-much several times a day.  This will allow the ability to run polls… for example, if we are planning on having a dinner, you could put up a poll asking people what they’d like from a group of options, like "Lasagna", "Pizza" or "Go out to eat".  People then vote… you can make decisions based on that.  (I can limit who can and can’t vote if it gets abused.)

After thinking about it for a bit, I then thought I could expand my original idea of JUST the Webb family, and include the extended family.  I added the Curry family (in case Debbie & Homer would like to have a place for their family to communicate), as well as the Ewing, Taaffe and the Weifert families.  This is totally flexible.  If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.  At least at first, people will be able to read and write in any of the families forum, but if that gets to be a problem, I can make some changes.

I guess I should tell you how to find the forum…  The easiest way is from this here blog… Just below the blue title bar, there is a white bar with currently 3 buttons on it… "About," "Subscribe," and "Forum".  Click on "Forum."  The URL for it is http://forum.kellieron.net (site no longer exists).  Before you can write or vote in any poll, you must register AND login. Near the top, there is a clickable link called "Register".  Click this and it will take you to an age verification page (I couldn’t figure out how to disable that).  It then takes you to the registration page.  Choose a username… the name you want others to see.  Enter your email address.  Enter a password you would like to use for the site.  These are the mandatory things to fill out.  Unless you have an AIM or ICQ account, you can ignore that stuff.  If you have a web-page, you could enter that.  You can list where you live… like I entered "Roseville, CA."  The default time should be "GMT -8" for Pacific time… Obviously, Richard or Debbie may want to choose their own time.  I believe Debbie would be just "GMT."  Once you submit, it will send you an automated email.  Check your email and click on the key for confirmation.  Go back to the forum and "Log In", using your new username and password.  You can always go back to your "Profile" later and adjust some of the stuff you set in your registration process.  You can create custom signatures (text shown after every message you write… like your name) or avatars.    You can find or create any avatar and upload it to the forum for your use.  If you need help with it, let me know. 

For some of you, this should all be a "piece of cake", but I’m sure others will have SOME difficulty at first.  The bottom line is that the more you use it, the more useful it becomes.  I’m hoping everyone likes it. 

I THINK that I have now set it up for anyone that wants to subscribe to receive new blog posts via email. You’ll notice near the top of this page, a space saying “About” and “Subscribe”. Go to “Subscribe” and enter your email address. Shortly thereafter, you’ll get an email with a code. Click on that code and it will confirm you on the list. You will then get an email anytime I post a new message. I’m just making this an option because I can. I’m doing it MORE as a learning process for myself than a service to anyone else. If you do subscribe and wish to unsubscribe, follow the same process.

You can alternately enter your email address in the space below and chose subscribe.

I have finally gotten around to starting a new blog. Kellie has told me she’d like to restart a blog so we could keep family and friends up-to-date on the goings on in our lives.